If you have ever searched for a school online, you have met the ranked list. Ten schools, numbered, with a score beside each. It looks like an answer. It is usually an advertisement.
The school directory at clarvyn.ai/explore makes three promises, and they are printed on the page: no rankings, no paid placement, and no reviews from strangers. This post is about why, and about what a parent gets instead.
Why a ranked directory goes wrong
A directory that ranks schools has to decide what the number means. Exam results? Fees? How many parents clicked? Whatever it picks, the schools with the most to spend learn how to move up it. Then the directory sells the top slot, because somebody will pay for it, and from that day the order on the page is a price list. The parent reading it cannot tell which schools are there on merit and which are there on budget. A directory that sells position stops being information and starts being advertising.
Star ratings from anyone go the same way. A score anyone can leave is a score anyone can organise. A school with a motivated office and a WhatsApp group can reach five stars in a weekend, and a school that expelled one angry family can be pulled down to one. Neither number tells you anything about the classroom.
What the directory does instead
Schools are listed in alphabetical order. Nothing about a school's place on the page can be bought, and there is no table to climb.
Every school on the list asked to be there. A school's page is off by default, and only the head or the proprietor can switch it on. That sounds like a small thing. It means a school on the list is a school that wants to be found and has written its own page.
What the page carries are the facts a school would put on its own gate: the name and crest, the town and region, whether it is a day school, a boarding school or both, the years it teaches from creche to SHS, whether it is private, public, mission or international, what it offers, and how to reach it. A school can add a one-line description, photographs it has chosen to show, and a fee position if it wants one. Anything a school leaves blank is left off the page. There are no empty rows.
A parent narrows the list rather than sorting it: by region, by primary or secondary, by boarding, by type of school, and by what a school offers. Narrowing is honest in a way sorting is not. A filter on boarding returns every boarding school, and none of them is above another because it paid.
One more small thing. The link from a school's page to its own website is marked so that it passes no search-ranking benefit. A directory whose links raise a website in Google is a directory someone will pay to be in, so ours do not.
Where reviews come from
Reviews do exist on Clarvyn. What is different is who can write one.
A review is written in the Clarvyn parent app, and only by a parent whose child is at that school now. That is not a box the parent ticks. At the moment the review is written, Clarvyn checks the school's own records: is this person recorded as a guardian of a child who is enrolled this year and still on the roll. A parent whose child left last term cannot review the school. A parent whose child was never there is told that only parents with a child at the school can review it.
A review is a rating from one to five, with an optional comment, and each parent has one review per school. They can change it later. The school cannot. A head reads reviews in the console and can neither edit nor remove one, which is exactly what makes the reviews a school does have worth reading.
On the public page, a review shows its stars, its comment and its date, and the average is shown only when at least one parent has written one. A school nobody has reviewed has no score. It is not a zero, and it is not placed below a school somebody disliked. On the web the parent's name is left off: a parent agreed to their words being read, not to their name being published beside them. In the app, where every reader is a signed-in parent, the name is shown.
That is what "no reviews" on the explore page means: nowhere for a stranger to put a score on a school your child attends.
What this gives a parent
A shorter list, and a truer one. The schools near you that teach the years you need, with the facts each school chose to state and the opinions of parents who are actually there. It will not tell you which school is best. That was never a question a directory could answer. It will tell you which schools to go and see, and what to ask when you get there.